![]() What is immediately apparent is that this same people had other words for their hunting sticks but used ‘boornarang’ to refer to a returning throw-stick. Indeed, it was not until 1822 that this fascinating device was described in detail and recorded as a ‘bou-mar-rang’, from the language of the Turuwal people of the George’s River near Port Jackson. There was much talk about the boomerang in the colony, but still no recording of its name.Ī year after Barrallier’s journal entry, and possibly because of it, the Sydney Gazette published the first known printed description of a boomerang’s flight path, but even then it was not given the name boomerang. Not surprisingly, this strange object captured their attention, and soon there were rumours that Aborigines could throw a boomerang out, to hit a kangaroo and then return to the thrower (this physical impossibility was the result of a failure to distinguish between two very different types of throw-sticks). Although it is often claimed that Bungaree, an Aboriginal befriended by the First Fleet settlers, was the first person to be seen throwing a boomerang in Port Jackson (Sydney), many colonists had in fact reported seeing the boomerang in action west of Sydney in the first few years of the colony, before Bungaree was doing his demonstrations in Sydney proper. They throw it on the ground or in the air, making it revolve on itself, and with such a velocity that one cannot see it returning towards the ground only the whizzing of it is heard.īarrallier did not give it a name, but referred to it only as a ‘piece of wood in the form of a half circle’. His journal entry, dated 12 November, 1802, and written in French, mentioned the boomerang in a footnote, as he attempted to find a way across the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney: ![]() It took an ensign of the New South Wales Corps, Francis Louis Barrallier, a French-born surveyor and engineer, to make the first written record of a boomerang’s return flight. Indeed, boomerangs continued to be referred to as ‘wooden swords’ for a couple of years after settlement, in the journals of Governor Arthur Phillip (1789), Captain Watkin Tench (1789) and surgeon John White (1790). All of these early explorers thought that boomerangs were swords and none of them ever saw a boomerang being thrown, nor did any of them ever record the term boomerang. His botanist, Sir Joseph Banks, also likened the devices to ‘Arabian scymetars’ when he saw them in their hands and fibre belts, as William Dampier had done when he saw them on the west coast of Australia in 1688. When he arrived in Botany Bay in 1770, he recorded that the Aborigines were ‘all arm’d with darts and wooden swords’. In fact, there is no record that he ever used the term or even saw a returning boomerang being thrown, though he did take one back to England, thinking it was a primitive wooden sword. It is a myth that it was Captain James Cook who recorded the name ‘boomerang’ for the first time. Third, Aboriginal peoples had no writing so could not record their words before the arrival of Europeans, who soon discovered that the returning boomerang was called a ‘birgan’ by Aborigines around Moreton Bay, and a ‘barragadan’ by those in north-western New South Wales. Roughly 60% of Aboriginal peoples used both returning boomerangs and non-returning hunting sticks, and therefore had words for them a further 10% had only non-returning hunting sticks, and the remaining 30% used neither. Second, the returning boomerang was unknown to Aboriginal peoples in most of the Northern Territory, all of Tasmania, half of South Australia and the northern parts of Queensland and Western Australia. The following should clarify some issues at the outset.įirst, there is no such thing as “the Aboriginal language” there were in fact between 500 and 600 different Aboriginal languages at the time of European settlement in 1788, each with its own terms for tools and weapons. There are several myths and misconceptions about the origin of the word boomerang that need dispelling before we investigate its use in the English language and in the modem world. What is a Boomerang? An investigation of the word boomerang in Aboriginal and English languagesīy Tony Butz (former history teacher and linguist, past editor of the Boomerang Bulletin, and the founder of the Boomerang Throwing Association of New South Wales)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |